The key to the invention is an electronic controller that decreases optical noise tenfold. The controller provides subelectron resolution with any charge-coupled device (CCD)-based imager, such as the NASA camera attached to Québec's Mont-Mégantic Observatory.

Photon etc. (Québec) has licensed the controller design from the University of Montreal and sold the first one to NASA, for the observatory installation; the second to the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil; and a third to a European-Canadian consortium equipping a telescope in Chile. Photon etc. was spun off from the University of Montreal after operating for several years under the university's affiliated École Polytechnique IT business incubator.

"The big problem with CCDs is getting rid of the noise," said a Photon etc. spokesman. "In low-light conditions like astronomical observation, you don't have enough photons to generate a good electrical signal in the CCD, but if you use a multiplier you are multiplying the noise too. What [University of Montreal physicist] Olivier Daigle did was to create a new method for counting the incoming electrons which decreases that noise by 10 times."

Daigle designed the controller to multiply light without increasing noise at streaming data rates of 25 Gbytes/second. The controller works with any CCD imager attached to an optical instrument, from a telescope to an endoscope. The add-on effectively doubles the diameter of the optical instrument to which it is attached.

For instance, for the NASA camera at the Mont-Mégantic Observatory, the Photon etc. controller doubles the effective size of the 60-inch mirror to gather as much light as a 120-inch mirror.

The controller architecture could also be deployed with the CCD imagers used in gear for nuclear medicine, bioluminescence and Raman imaging.

Funding was provided by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Photon etc., the Canada Foundation for Innovation and Fonds québeçois de la recherche sur la nature et les technologies.